Speaking on Democracy Now!, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson -- the longtime aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell -- warns against the expanding U.S. drone war and President Obama's nomination of one of its key architects, John Brennan, to head the Central Intelligence Agency. "What's happening with drone strikes around the world right now is, in my opinion, as bad a development as many of the things we now condemn so readily with 20/20 hindsight in the George W. Bush administration. We are creating more enemies than we are killing. We're doing things that violate international law, even killing American citizens without due process and have an attorney general that has says due process does not necessarily include the legal process." On Brennan, Wilkerson adds: "I think we ought to have a really, really hard discussion about what he represents will probably take to the directorship of the CIA."

The entire interview is of interest, but the part focusing on the Kennedy assassination begins around 30:22.

In an interview on KPFA's "Letters to Washington" today, retired Army Colonel Lawrennce Wilkerson suggested that the "consequences for one of (our) presidents" for standing up to military-industrial complex "were not good."

Wilkerson, who was also Chief of Staff to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that President John F. Kennedy stood up to military power in America twice: once during the Bay of Pigs invasion and once during the Cuban Missle Crisis.

According to Wilkerson, JFK "stood up to a very, very aggressive military" and, as a consequence, "we know what happened to John Kennedy."

When pressed by the incredulous interviewer, Mitch Jesserich, on whether he thought there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, Wilkerson said "there are consequences, whether they are direct consquences or indirect consequences, for standing up to corporate and military power in the United States of America."

Wilkerson said that he thinks "the Warren Commission was a complete whitewash. No question in my mind about it..." and that, in his view, disgrunteld Cuban Americans involved in the Bay of Pigs affair and "perhaps some rogue elements within the United States itself" worked together to kill the president in 1963.

"I've studied the ballistics...I've studied the area where Kennedy's assassin supposedly shot from...I've studied the grassy knoll...and there is absolutely no way the Warren Commission wasn't a whitewash," Wilkerson said.

However, Wilkerson seemed confused in his timeline about when the House Select Committee on Assassinations (which concluded there probably was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy) was convened. According to what he says in the interveiw, Wilkerson says that the Select Committee was convened after Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which was released in the early 1990s. HSCA was convened in the late 1970s.

Wilkerson also seemed to hedge his opinion about the extent of the alleged conspiracy to assassinate JFK.

"I'm not saying that...the military-industrial complex or any part of it...was responsible for Kennedy's assassination..." Wilkerson said. "I'm simply saying that you can set up circumstances...that are more conducive to those kinds of things happening."

Such circumstances, he said, can result when a president stands up to military power.

He said that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other conservative commentators can instigate "crazies" in the country to oppose President Obama for "the color of his skin...and the color of his actions" and could "incentivize" "some nut" to take a "potshot" at the president.